The Yiddish popular theatre produced a staggering volume of theatrical entertainment consumed by millions of Jews. Most of this mass-appealing output was, however, delegitimized by Jewish intellectuals, journalists, and scholars as ‘a flood of trash’, dismissing it as a primitive, plagiarized, vulgar, banal, and worthless form of art, while calling for a radical reform in the theatre. Under the division of Shund (trash) versus Kunst (art), a valuable component of the cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in modern times, and by extension, of the 20th century mainstream culture has been overlooked. The DYBBUK project aims to uncover, restore, and analyze the neglected, yet influential, corpus of the Yiddish popular theatre.
The DYBBUK project pursues three objectives: (1) Surveying, and mapping the dramatic and musical themes of the Yiddish popular theatre. (2) Reconstructing and analyzing its audio-visual forms. (3) Reenacting and examining its theatrical and vocal practices. DYBBUK combines musicological, theatrical, historical, and philological scholarship with practice-base theatre research. To grasp the theatrical spectacles, expressions, and images that attracted the Jewish masses to the theatre, and the influence this theatre had on the formation of the modernist Jewish canon, the project integrates sound analysis of early commercial theatre recordings and musicological examination of music sheets with dramatic manuscripts and libretti, photographs and visual images, biographies, theatre ephemera, and criticism. It aims to bridge the gap between the transient theatrical experience and its archival remains, and leap beyond the textual barriers of the drama, by producing a meticulously planned reenactment of a Shund musical play in a practice-based theatre research, thus revealing the acting and vocal techniques, theatrical forms, and messages staged in the Yiddish popular theatre. Through this integrative research, we aim to advance our understanding of 20th century mass popular culture.
